This time of the year most folks who visit the U.S. state of Vermont are on a leaf-peeping mission. However, there’s a little museum housed in an old barn that also deserves a detour.  The Museum of Everyday Life is a unique institution which offers “a heroic, slow-motion cataloguing of the quotidian–a detailed, theatrical expression of gratitude and love for the minuscule and unglamorous experience of daily life in all its forms. We celebrate mundanity, and the mysterious delight embedded in the banal but beloved objects we touch everyday. In pursuit of this mission, some of the questions we ask ourselves are: What would it be like to imagine a museum filled, not with exotic objects, but with perfectly familiar ones? What would it look like to defy the commodity-based model of collection and display? And how might it be possible to create massive participatory collections of objects in a way that illuminates the back and forth dance, the essential, vibrant relationship between objects and people?”

“The Museum has three components: 1) The Museum of Everyday Life Philosophy Department, involving the production and publication of theoretical writing about people and their relationship to objects, curatorial methodologies, and encylcopedism, 2) The Museum of Everyday Life Performance Company, which creates puppet shows and performances in an ongoing effort to examine and everyday life via the life of objects, and lastly, but most important 3) The Museum of Everyday Life Exhibitions and Collections, comprised of actual exhibits which make the theoretical work tangible and concrete.”

“The museum is located on Rt 16 about 5.5 miles south of Glover village in Northeastern Vermont, which we acknowledge is the traditional and unceded territory of the Abenaki and the Shawnee people.”